To think that the government did this on purpose

[therhubarbbrothers]

The A level results fiasco seemed to penalise bright children from disadvantaged schools. Aibu to think the government knew that this would happen but saw it as acceptable ?

It wasn't an unexpected situation at all. They knew from at least March and had plenty of time to fully consider options.

I mean it wasn't just the UK in this position. Only other countries haven't fucked it up so monumentally that I am aware of.

I don't fully agree with your analysis prh47bridge.
I have heard many Conservatives arguing that schools need to do a much better job for disadvantaged children.

Yes, from the people who might be called 'old fashioned Tories' - not the toadies and incompetents who Boris Johnson has surrounded himself with in Government. He himself has no idea about the education of the majority and doesn't appear to care either.

Blaming Ofqual? Where did they spring from then? Who are they answerable to if not the Government initially? At one time a Minister would resign when someone in his department messed up - even though everyone knew he wasn't personally responsible. Now they just brazen their way out of it.

There is no perfect system, but at least with the U-turn, all students are receiving grades on the same basis

But not being accepted at universities that previously rejected them with lower grades. So it's hardly a good outcome is it ?

@HipTightOnions

But it’s better to assume all the students working towards an A achieve an A than to randomly assume one of them will mess up on the day and give one of them a C at random.

But they weren’t given a C at random. Teachers had to rank students so the student who the teacher thought was most likely to get a C based on their performance and ability, not at random would have been given a C.

But it wasn't the student who we thought would most likely get a C who we ranked last in their grade. We ranked last in their grade the weakest student of those we thought, based on the evidence available, would get an A (my school only predicted one A at A level, so this applies more to GCSE/ C at A level for us).

Given any of the students can have a bad day, arbitrarily deciding that it was the weakest student of a given grade who would have that bad day is the issue.

Ofqual had nothing to do with Gavin Williamson’s announcement last Tuesday that students could pick the best of their CAG, their calculated grade or a valid mock result. You can tell that from the blatantly pissed off announcement they made once he said it, saying they’d need some time to make it workable.

That’s all on Gavin Williamson. He should resign for that bit of chaos at the least, even if you think he should have understood nothing about the algorithm.

However: teachers had the students in mind when assigning their grades. Ofqual had the stats in mind when assigning theirs. It was the DfE’s job, led by Williamson, to stand in between the two and make sure that the result was fair to both students and the stats. They appear to have made no effort to do this and when they realised their fuck-up, dropped the ball at the last minute and made things much worse.

In the past I've had 'dead cert' A grade students come out with Cs while the industrious but not particularly brilliant B student got their B - this system didn't allow for that. It was never able to replicate the results of exams.

No, that's a conspiracy theory.

The thing with the conservatives etc (I don't vote for them but understand their stated positions) is they want the world to be a meritocracy (as well as posh people be able to keep their stuff of course.) They would outright encourage children attending poor schools to better themselves.

I don’t think it was done intentionally but anyone with half a brain cell would have predicted that not adjusting cohorts with small class S
sizes would have massively favoured private schools. I can see that there would be less adjustment Overall necessary for private schools though. They know their students better, they have higher attaining students ( high grades are more predictable than mid grades) and they generally have more resources to monitor and access students. There will be fewer ‘outliers’

I meant that all are now receiving CAGs, not that CAGs are perfect. In that way, they are all receiving the same treatment (instead of some getting CAGs and some getting algorithm grades)

“Same treatment” is superficial and misleading though. There were broadly 2 approaches to creating CAGs. One approach produced CAGs that were much more similar to the algorithm grades, because that is what we were told to expect. These students are at a disadvantage now.

Even if it wasn’t done intentionally the lack of checks and balances on the system employed is unforgivable. GW may not have known anything about algorithms but the buck stops with him not Ofqual because they answer to him not the other way round. He should have made sure he was briefed properly and In detail about all the possible pros and cons of the system they were implementing. This fiasco smacks of systemic problems at the heart of a large and important department and a loss of public trust in this government

But it wasn't the student who we thought would most likely get a C who we ranked last in their grade. We ranked last in their grade the weakest student of those we thought, based on the evidence available, would get an A (my school only predicted one A at A level, so this applies more to GCSE/ C at A level for us).

Although presumably you did expect, if you were predicting higher grades than usual, that they would be “downgraded” according to the ranking and your historical results.
Given any of the students can have a bad day, arbitrarily deciding that it was the weakest student of a given grade who would have that bad day is the issue.

I don’t think “arbitrarily” is correct or helpful. Your own ranking effectively specified, when push came to shove, which students were more or less secure in the grade.

The thing with the conservatives etc (I don't vote for them but understand their stated positions) is they want the world to be a meritocracy (as well as posh people be able to keep their stuff of course.) They would outright encourage children attending poor schools to better themselves.

I may have misunderstood that. But if I haven't I need to point out we're discussing planet earth, now. Not wherever you've been reading about.

However: teachers had the students in mind when assigning their grades. Ofqual had the stats in mind when assigning theirs

Some teachers had both, because we were told to.

My worry isn't just that the current government ministers make these cock-ups, it's that our core government implementation departments are completely useless, including the Civil Service and senior NHS officials. This means that even if we had a competent government in the wings (we don't) things wouldn't significantly improve.

Some teachers had both, because we were told to.

While schools had their own historical data in mind, there’s no way that they could have had the national data in mind.

No, I’m talking about their own historical data. In our case - state school, large cohort, fairly consistent results - we had very few “downgrades” because we’d already imposed them ourselves.

@Jaxhog

Someone with sense.

Over the last 10 years the regulatory functions of the civil service have been skinned to the point that they are frankly unfit for purpose.

The CEOs have been moved from department to department. Great you may think, get rid of the chaff. Oh nooooo, voluntary redundancy and we all know what that means.

Also every 3 years or so departments are reviewed to see whether the work can be privatised. Its hard to privatise regulatory functions which protect the public. It isnt profitable.

Look at the pensions debacle , more has been stolen from SIPPS by fraudsters by individuals ill equipped to choose their own investments than the government will ever admit.

The damage done during austerity won't be realised for quite some time. But you are right there is little integrity left.

@HipTightOnions

I meant that all are now receiving CAGs, not that CAGs are perfect. In that way, they are all receiving the same treatment (instead of some getting CAGs and some getting algorithm grades)

“Same treatment” is superficial and misleading though. There were broadly 2 approaches to creating CAGs. One approach produced CAGs that were much more similar to the algorithm grades, because that is what we were told to expect. These students are at a disadvantage now.

Exactly.

One school looked carefully at results and gave the candidates what they thought they most likely would.
The next looked at results and decided what the candidates might get given a good paper, non-stop work and a prevailing wind.
Another gave them results and upped them all by a grade in case they were modelled down (as one teacher here said they were told to do by the head)
And the last just gave them all A/A* whatever (ofsted have said there were schools that did this despite having a normal distribution of grades every other year)

Who misses out? The first one for being honest. Who gains most? The most dishonest method.

What's going to happen in future for Cags-the schools that put them up one grade this time will go for 2 to beat all the other schools? Quite likely.

And it's not just a case of getting lower grades for the first set of people. You're probably thinking that it doesn't matter as they got the grade they deserved.
But in this life you're compared. The person with an honest B is having now to compete against the person who should have got a B and was given an inflated A, and the person who should have got a C and was given an inflated B.
And people mentally will mark them down. "Oh, a 2020 B, really only a C". It won't be considered equal to a 2019 B.
If you think that won't happen, then I knew some people in recruitment in 2000, and they commented that you didn't just look at the A-level results, you also looked at the year as there was a huge difference in for example a A-level sat in 1984 and 1994.

And you've probably got the impression that most grades were unfair, most people missed their first choice uni etc. Actually more people than ever before got their first choice uni. Grade boundaries were higher all round-yes, even from the state schools.

By turning it into a private v state you were showing that you were just listening to the media. Many private schools were unhappy with results, many state schools were happy with results.
Problem was that the media chose to focus this year on state school unhappy, rather than the normal "grades up, look at these success stories". They could have done the latter, but they chose not to. That encouraged the people who were unhappy to shout about it.
That painted a media picture that didn't show that a lot of schools were happy about the results-or at least fairly content. But that doesn't make a good news story.

I know, Hip, and obviously being maths we were in a far better position to do that than other subjects even within our own schools due to cohort size (and being maths we understand it better than other subjects anyway).

I don’t think it’s fair to criticise other schools or subjects based on our own fairly comfy position.

There isa quote that says something about never assume something is done through malice when it can be explained through plain stupidity.

No I don't think they did it on purpose - they are not that organised!

I don’t think it’s fair to criticise other schools or subjects based on our own fairly comfy position.

I am absolutely not criticising other schools! There was clearly inconsistency in the guidance we were receiving.

I’m just trying to counter the narrative:

• All teachers predicted what their students were capable of.
• The algorithm randomly chose who would have a bad day.
• Yes, there has been grade inflation but it doesn’t matter because all students have been treated the same.

Last year ds school recorded the highest A level results in the city having previously only been mid table, the school had a new head who has pushed both staff & students to improve the standard of work done. There was the highest ever recorded number of students getting A & A results & several pupils have been accepted at Oxford & Cambridge something that has been practically unheard of in previous years. This year on results day every result was downgraded, not one pupil got an A or A, if the algorithm had gone on previous years results there should have been A or A* results, could the downgrading have been due to the fact the school has a high percentage of pupils from underprivileged backgrounds, well over 50% live on council estates & 40% of pupils get free school meals & pupil premium?

could the downgrading have been due to the fact the school has a high percentage of pupils from underprivileged backgrounds, well over 50% live on council estates & 40% of pupils get free school meals & pupil premium?

No, the algorithm did not deliberately target these groups!

It used results from the last 3 years, not just last year. Rapidly-improving schools were thereby penalised.

could the downgrading have been due to the fact the school has a high percentage of pupils from underprivileged backgrounds, well over 50% live on council estates & 40% of pupils get free school meals & pupil premium?

The algorithm didn’t have that info, so no.

It was known well in advance that rapidly improving schools would be screwed and it was part of the appeals process that schools could challenge their results if they provided evidence of rapid improvement (e.g. Ofsted).